She’ll get up Friday at 3:30 a.m. to ensure she’s at the airport two hours early for her 7 a.m. flight to Houston.

The reason is simple: Sometimes U.S. Customs detains her for extra questioning.

After the five-hour flight to Texas, she’ll wait another hour or so before grabbing a plane to Jackson, Miss.

She won’t get to Yazoo until after dark; it’ll be midnight before she gets to bed.

Jodie will be up before dawn to be at the medium security Federal Correctional Institution where she will be searched before being allowed to spend six hours in a common visiting hall with her husband.

“We get to share food from the vending machines,” she quipped.

She’ll do the same Sunday. On Monday, she’ll be up again with the sun and back on the road. It will be late night before she’s back in Vancouver.

“He’s looking better than he ever has,” she said, laughing.

Ironically, as haggard as she may feel, her husband will greet her tanned, fit and in better shape than when he was incarcerated.

He walks three miles a day in the sunshine, breathing in all that good, pure southern air, she explained, and “it’s 30 degrees all the time!”

Marc’s eating a head of garlic a day because he has become a believer in its curative and prophylactic properties: The Prince of Pot now is the Lord of Garlic.

Two years into his five-year sentence, he and Jodie are making the best of a lousy situation. At least, she said, their business is booming.

“On 4/20, it was just crazy in the store — outstanding,” Jodie said, of her multi-level Hastings street headquarters, home to a store selling marijuana paraphernalia, books and clothes, as well as an herb museum, smoking lounge and pot-activists’ boardroom.

“That things are going so well has made it a lot easier. I can’t imagine what I would be doing if it had failed.”

And never has Emery’s cause of legalizing marijuana attracted so many high-profile-establishment supporters — four Vancouver mayors, four former B.C. attorneys-general, medical officers of health, the federal Liberal Party ...

Since his incarceration in the fall of 2010, Marc has seen his battle taken up by these most unlikely of allies.

Meanwhile he is relaxing behind bars, upgrading his education (he was top of his GED class, Jodie said, though she added quickly “it is Mississippi ...”).

Marc reads voraciously and plays in a band whose song list is a stoner’s blast from the past — White Room, Black Magic Woman, Purple Haze. He continues to be a huge presence on the Internet and his blog is a classic of prison writing.

Emery has always been a charismatic, engaged man and prison has burnished his better traits.

Given the inequity of his treatment by Canadian authorities and the scandalous five-year U.S. sentence for selling pot seeds, it is amazing his indomitable, glass-is-always-half-full spirit remains lambent.

Together, the couple is overcoming the kind of adversity that crushes many.

Jodie, too, has risen to the moment and taken up Emery’s mantle as the foremost spokeswoman in Canada for overturning cannabis prohibition.

She appeared on stage a week ago with the former American prosecutor who jailed her husband but now says the drug war should be ended.

Next weekend it’s Toronto for a handful of events, then back to Mississippi to see Marc and a return flight to Toronto the following weekend.

From a waiflike, placard-waving presence at Emery’s rallies, to an assured, articulate activist regularly wooed by political parties of all stripes, Jodie has grown incredibly. Yet she continues to turn down the chance to run for office.

“They all want me to tone down or drop my pot activism and I’m just not prepared to do that. It’s like, this is why they’re interested in me in the first place, but they want me to give it up?”

Mulgrew: Jodie Emery a force in her own right

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